Superfície is pleased to present the exhibition Pedro Escosteguy: poesia, vanguarda e opinião [Pedro Escosteguy: Poetry, Avant-garde and Opinion], the first solo exhibition of the artist in São Paulo. The show revisits the work and career of Pedro Escosteguy, a name of great relevance to avant-garde art and the decentralization of traditional art media. The artist’s retrospective reaffirms Superfície’s commitment to rescuing and consolidating important names in Brazilian avant-garde art, and is accompanied by a panoramic book on the artist published by Superfície Publicações, which will be released at the end of the exhibition.

Pedro Escosteguy was a central figure in the political art debate in the country, characterized by his participation in and organization of various events that have become famous in art history, such as Opinião 65, Proposta 65, Opinião 66, Pare (1966), Nova Objetividade Brasileira (1967). The artist was also present at the 8th and 9th São Paulo Biennials, in 1965 and 1967, respectively. During the same period, he developed the film Arte Pública (1967), for which he wrote the text and screenplay, documenting the 1967 Biennial, the studios of various artists, and performances by Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica.

The 1960s marked a fundamental period for art in Brazil: in the face of political and socio-cultural crises, a break with traditional supports began, pointing to a more participatory art that sought to transcend its formal principles, expand technical possibilities, and incorporate new processes. In this context, the poet Pedro Geraldo Escosteguy settled in Rio de Janeiro and became close to names such as Roberto Magalhães, Carlos Vergara, Rubens Gerchman and Antonio Dias.

From this point on, Escosteguy’s poetic production began to experiment with techniques and media, entering a new realm: the three-dimensional universe of his semantic objects. The importance of Pedro Escosteguy’s work is due to its intrinsic qualities, as well as to its pioneering and innovative nature he brought to his peers and to Brazilian avant-garde art movements at the time. By fusing aesthetics and politics, he was able to break down the traditional creative boundaries between literature and the visual arts, allowing them to overflow into the real world of objects and reinvent them in a new integral space that was still being formulated and invented, inviting the viewer to participate in the work.

His work and his role as an intellectual leader provided the most important inputs to instrumentalize the development of other underlying, parallel or interconnected creative experimentations. In the teeming universe of poetic creation at that time, in which the articulation of word and image was structural, Escosteguy was perhaps one of the few poets to assume a full and indisputable place in the universe of the visual arts.

With a text by Evandro Salles, Pedro Escosteguy: poesia, vanguarda e opinião brings together fundamental works to understand the production of Pedro Escosteguy, and points to the urgency of revisiting the artist’s work, allowing us to update and re-establish its historical relevance.

The exhibition will remain on display at Superfície Oscar Freire until the 7th of December.

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Check out the exhibition’s preview [PT]
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Trecho extraído do texto Os Objetos Semânticos de Pedro Escosteguy no Contexto da Arte Brasileira, escrito por Evandro Salles em ocasião do livro Poesia, vanguarda e nova objetividade, projeto da Superfície Publicações com lançamento previsto para o término da exposição.